At a press conference on Tuesday, the Palestinian Authority (PA) prime minister Mohammad Shtayyeh announced that, should the Jewish state go ahead with plans to apply sovereignty to parts of the West Bank, his government will unilaterally declare Palestinians statehood. What, asks Amnon Lord, would the consequences be?

Yasir Arafat already declared the establishment of a Palestinian state in November 1988, when he was still in Tunisia. In November 2012, the Palestinian Authority launched its diplomatic campaign to upgrade its status within the international community. As a result, many entities across the globe already view it as a “state.” For example, the ever-menacing International Criminal Court recognizes a Palestinian state, ergo the PA’s routine threat of “going to The Hague.”

That same year, the United Nations passed a resolution to upgrade the PA’s status from “non-state observer” to non-member state. . . . Many countries around the world circuitously recognize the PA as a state in such a way that it isn’t always clear what they mean when they say “recognition.” It appears the only development of substance and of potential concern to Israel—in the future—is . . . the [election in the U.S.] of a Democratic administration that would recognize a Palestinian state. And even then, Israel’s answer will be: we’re ready to negotiate peace with the Palestinians.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.